Friday, June 16, 2017

London is Open...to interpretation

The UK capital's chattering classes love to celebrate the fact that London voted 'overwhelmingly' to remain in the EU usually as part of their wider glee about its irreproachable poster boy Mayor and its inherently more diverse, cosmopolitan, liberal, tolerant (etc.) population. This despite the fact that recent YouGov research suggested that any given Londoner is now twice as likely to hold extremely illiberal views on a range of social issues as the equivalent rural dweller. This, you might acknowledge, is not how things used to be. Cultural diversity appears to come with an undercurrent of cultural divergence...from the mainstream. Who knew? So prior to dumping all those Leave voters in the basket marked deplorable, — xenophobic white van drivers the lot of them — have a bash at recognising that a good number of the individuals who plugged for the other option are rampant homophobes with a near-medieval perspective on the appropriate place for women in society.